The Cogenitor's Tale
by Brenda Shaffer-Shiring
Summary: Sometimes a story isn't over when you think it is. Trip's lessons to the Vissian cogenitor have more profound consequences than he could ever have anticipated.


Sometimes a story isn't over when you think it is. Trip's lessons to the Vissian cogenitor have more profound consequences than he ever could have anticipated. Contains spoilers for the episode "Cogenitor."  
  
With thanks to my husband Chuck, who helped me past a stumbling block in the plot.  
  
  
  
  
  
The Cogenitor's Tale  
  
by Brenda Shaffer-Shiring  
  
  
  
Actually, I taught myself to read.  
  
It was difficult at first, learning that there were patterns to each letter, to each word -- but once I learned the patterns, everything fit together in the most fascinating way. One word led to another, then another, and within a day I was reading chapters from a child's history text. Not long after that, I was borrowing PADDs from the library in the house where I lived then.  
  
Not my house, of course.  
  
I borrowed the PADDs furtively, from dusty, little-used corners of the library, always rearranging the units so there would be no gap to attract notice. Each one I borrowed I read quickly and hid carefully in my chamber. I returned it as quickly as I could, and for days I would stay well away from the library, to attract no suspicion. (In fact, that remained my pattern for some time.) If anyone knew that I could read....  
  
I didn't know what would happen. It seemed unlikely they would kill me. They didn't kill the First, that other, who learned how to read from a crewman on an alien starship. No, s/he killed him/herself.  
  
I think I will simply say "herself" when I talk about the First. It is too awkward otherwise, and there is...there is no pronoun for such as us, save for "it," and I will not speak of her as if she were a thing. I will leave that to men and women.  
  
Anyway, as I said, they did not kill her. She killed herself. And of course she had no right to do that. She was too valuable a resource, and it was not her place to have a "self" to kill.  
  
I wondered, when I heard the story, why one of us who had learned to *read* would kill herself. It seemed a marvelous gift to me, to be able to read, and for much of my life I had wondered what it would be like, to be a true male or female and know how to deduce meanings from those mysterious squiggles on PADD or paper. One of the few things I had been taught was that a cogenitor could not read, and did not need to. Still, as a young one I had jealously coveted such lessons, and the mind to put them to use.  
  
If the First could read, why would she want to die? I asked that question of the one who told me her story. He (and of course he was no more truly a "he" than the First was a "she," but I will call him that because he had more a male's seeming than a female's) shook his head, as if he did not understand why I would say it that way.  
  
  
  
At the time, we were both in the small hospital whose patients were limited to our kind. I had injured my arm in a fall, and while the medical technician (a true female) had mended it well enough, she wished me to remain a day for observation. The couple to whom I was assigned seemed disappointed at the temporary loss of my services, but they accepted her judgment. My comrade had suffered more severe injuries. (I was later to learn that his own current couple were quite angry about their inability to conceive, and blamed it on him even though he had been cogenitor for a number of reproductions.) He had come to the infirmary before me, and would remain after I had gone.  
  
Before I arrived, he had heard the gossip, from a cogenitor who had been assigned to a couple who knew the couple the First had been serving at the time of her suicide.  
  
The couple the First was serving had been assigned to one of our starships, a great and powerful vessel whose mission it was to see into the heart of a sun. How the vessel could do this, why it should even want to, I do not know, but that information is not really needful to my story. This is: according to my storyteller, this great ship encountered another starship, a small strange vessel from some far-distant world called Earth. The men and women of that ship (and it is only men and women they have; the one who was telling me the story said it seems they have only two genders, and need no more) came aboard our great vessel, while our men and women went aboard their smaller one. Men and women, and one cogenitor: the First.  
  
Against all Vissian custom, a man on that little vessel befriended the First. Under the very head-arches of her masters, he taught her to read and to play games, let her listen to Earth music and took her for a tour of the Earth ship, just as if she were a true person. Indeed, he told her she *was* a true person, no less than the males and females we serve.  
  
Then her masters learned of his treachery, and the First's. She tried to take refuge on the Earth vessel, but despite the pleas of her friend, it would not shield her. It returned her to her masters instead. Once she was safely restored to their chambers, the masters disciplined her; how they never said and I have no wish to learn. At the least, they would have made certain that she knew there would be no more games or music, no more ship tours, no more book-PADDS. And when they had left her alone, she picked up the little knife from her dinner tray, and she cut her own throat.  
  
Her erstwhile masters told this story, with great bitterness and anger, at the dinner-table of their friends. And the cogenitor assigned to those friends, lurking near the dining-room door, heard the entire tale, and passed it on to the cogenitor who told me.  
  
At first, all I gleaned from the First's story was the fact that I most wanted to hear: a cogenitor had learned to read. A cogenitor could read.  
  
If one, then why not others?  
  
Why not me?  
  
I returned from the hospital determined to teach myself what the First had learned. But how could I begin?  
  
I began just as young males and females begin, with a basic text. (This one, and the others of my early reading, belonged to the elder child of the couple I was assigned to serve.) After that, then another, slightly more advanced. Then another, yet more advanced.  
  
And then I was reading. Reading as I had always dreamt of reading. And it had come so easily to me! If I had been taught as a child, surely by now I should have read everything there was to read!  
  
Why had I never been taught? Why should this simple pleasure be denied a cogenitor? What harm would it do if, while we sat in our chambers during leisure time, we should read a PADD instead of simply staring at the walls? I could not understand it.  
  
But as I read, even in my joy I came to understand why reading was forbidden to us. For my reading engendered restlessness. I read of mountains, and wanted to visit them. I read of plays, and wondered what it would be like to see them performed. I read of fine foods, and longed to taste them. I read of dancing, and wished that I could dance. (I tried that latter, a little, in my sleeping-chamber, but I fear that it was but a feeble effort.)  
  
The discovery of mathematics distracted me, a bit. For a time, my readings were all on that topic, and I devoted great effort to puzzling out the mysteries of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Of course I did the exercises only in my head, having no writing-PADD or paper to which I could commit them. While this probably slowed my learning, it could not be helped. Percentages and fractions were a new source of fascination, and I worked doggedly at the mysteries of something I had never known of before: the mathematics called "geometry."  
  
But my study of mathematics taught me yet another danger of reading. For one day at the supper-table, the male and female I then served were discussing the levying of a new tariff by a nearby trading group. The male drew out a PADD and began calculating the effect of the tariff on the profit for a hundred-divali shipment of chemicals. In the end, he consigned the problem to the PADD's calculator function.  
  
Meanwhile, I had already deduced the answer.  
  
Of course I said nothing. But in my head, in my heart, was the knowledge that I had performed a feat of mind more aptly than had true man or true woman.  
  
It was a strange, heady feeling -- and a frightening one. While I might not know what penalty would be exacted for reading, I had no doubt of what would happen to a cogenitor who considered him/herself superior to a true male or female in any respect.  
  
Late that night, I returned my most recent PADD to the couple's library. For the next several days I tried desperately to pretend that nothing was wrong, that nothing had changed in me, that I was as I had always been: silent and unschooled and ignorant.  
  
Now I think that was probably unnecessary effort. Unless I made a tremendous gaffe, they would see what they expected to see, and everyone knows that a cogenitor is as incapable of pride as it (I use the word they would choose) is of intellectual achievement. After all, we were designed by the Maker for one reason and one reason alone. Weren't we?  
  
The effort failed in any event. I was not what I had been before I learned to read, and no amount of pretense would make me so. Perhaps more to the point, once my immediate fear of discovery had faded, I discovered I did not *want* to be what I had been. Schooling my mind to blankness, my heart to passivity, was no longer restful or soothing to me; it was far too much like the stupor in which I had already spent so many of my days.  
  
I wanted to think, and I had learned to do so. And it was not long before I had returned to my old ways, and begun filching bookPADDs from the household library again.  
  
But the restlessness I had felt earlier was not cured; it had instead grown worse. There were times, now, when I would set my bookPADD aside and go to my window, looking out. What were the true stories happening, right now, on those streets that I did not walk? In that building that I could never choose to enter? I did not know. And even if I did, I would not dare attempt to take part in those stories.  
  
Stories, I had learned in all of my reading, happened only to men and women. I was neither.  
  
I hated myself, then, hated the body that restricted me to an existence that must be lived between four walls and for an isolated purpose. If not for this strange unmanly, unwomanly anatomy of mine, I could have lived a life as rich and full and any Vissian's, as full of learning and experience and intrigue. I could travel. I could work. I could solicit others' opinions, and share with them my own.  
  
I would not have to fear being caught with a few stolen grains of knowledge, of thinking, of *life*.  
  
I think I came very close, then, to choosing the First's solution, to taking my own life. In some ways, it would have been simpler than to go on as I did: privately a thinking, reasoning being, and publicly an inarticulate, uneducated creature.  
  
Strangely enough, a book of cosmological theory changed my mind. Or rather, a single line from that text: "No number between one and infinity makes sense."  
  
No number between one and infinity makes sense.  
  
I was not sure, at first, why that phrase (intended, after all, for such an esoteric topic as parallel universes) caught my eye, but after a moment it came to me.  
  
Once I had believed that no cogenitor could read. Then I had learned of one cogenitor who could read. Then I had learned to read myself.  
  
Of course, if no cogenitor could read, then no cogenitor could read. That much was logically consistent. It might be possible that, of all the cogenitors of Vissia, only one could read -- a prodigy, perhaps, or a freak of nature. Not as consistent, but still reasonable. But two, and only two? That seemed so improbable as to be impossible.  
  
Were there others who could read, then? Or who, if not actually able to read now, had the potential to learn? Who *wanted* to learn? Who --  
  
Who I could teach? Well, not *teach*, exactly; cogenitors have little opportunity to socialize with one another. But who, perhaps, I could encourage to read, who I could tell how *I* had learned to read.  
  
But why should I encourage them to do something that had nearly driven me to suicide -- that *had* driven the First to suicide? I struggled with that question, until my logic caught up with my instinct and I realized:  
  
One unhappy cogenitor is merely one unhappy cogenitor, who may be put down at need. But a dozen, a hundred, a thousand restless, unhappy cogenitors....  
  
We are rare, and we are necessary. We cannot all be put down.  
  
And as you know, I have had more than a little time to make good on my plan. When in hospital, or on those rare visits breeding couples occasionally make with one another, I have sounded out my fellow cogenitors, and spoken of my experience to those who seemed interested. Even in such an isolated life as we lead, contacts are made. And I am old for one of my kind, and have made many such. I have passed on my message many, many times, and it has been met with interest far greater than I would have hoped.  
  
So now the virus is out, out amongst all of us, the cogenitors you rule and protect and despise -- and whom you need to make your babies. How can you know how far it has spread, or who is infected?  
  
How many of us can you afford to destroy, when each cogenitor lost means dozens or hundreds of children who will never be born?  
  
Ask yourself that, Madam President. Ask yourself how many facilitators, how many babies, Vissia will destroy sooner than give my people the ordinary rights that any Vissian takes for granted? Put me down this day, this minute, if you will, but the question will not go away. Nor will the threat.  
  
Nor will the knowledge that I see in your eyes, that this very meeting proves you believe. When you kill me, you are fully aware that you do not put down an animal or a pet. You murder an intelligent being, one who is, if not male or female, nonetheless a fellow Vissian. More than that, you do so in the knowledge that it will in no way eliminate the threat -- and the opportunity -- that our world faces.  
  
Threat, or opportunity. Your choice, Madam President. Yours and that of all the people on this benighted planet. I hope that you will choose wisely.  
  
And you may stop referring to me as "you," ma'am. I have a name. I take it from the brave man, the generous man, the decent man who was the first friend that the cogenitors of Vissia have known in a thousand generations.  
  
I call myself Tucker.  
  
END  
  
But some seed fell on rich soil, and produced fruit, a hundred or sixty or thirtyfold.  
  
Matthew 13: 8 


End file.
